Interviews

As regular readers of this blog may recall, my wife -- Marina Park -- is the CEO of the Girl Scouts of Northern California. It has been a busy year from Marina and her staff because it is the 100 year anniversary of the founding of the Girl Scouts and there have been many celebrations. There was an especially wild one called 100 Hundred, Fun Hundred where some 24,000 girls gathered at the Alameda County Fair Grounds to camp and engage in activities ranging from rock climbing, to scuba diving, to dancing to roakc bands. You can read about the various celebrations here on their website.

Today, I am focusing on the Forever Green Awards -- a series of dinners that have been held throughout Northern California to honor women who "have made a significant impact to sustaining the environment, economy, or community." I have been three of the eight award dinners now and have been inspired by many of these women (here is the complete list), from opera soprano Katherine Jolly, to Jane Shaw the Chairman of the Board at Intel, to Amelia Ceja -- the Owner & President Ceja Vineyards.

I heard something last week at the dinner in Menlo Park that especially caught my ear -- from none other than Brandi Chastain, the Olympic Women's Soccer gold medal winner and world champion, who still plays soccer seriously and now often works as a sports broadcaster for ABC and ESPN. Of course, Chastain we always be remembered for throwing off her jersey after scoring the winning goal at the Women's World Championships in 1999 -- in 2004 she wrote a book called "Its Not About the Bra."

The award winners at Menlo Park were each asked to describe the best advice they ever received. Brandi began by talking about her grandfather and how crucial he was to her development as a soccer player and a person. Brandi said that he had a little reward system where she was paid $1.00 for scoring a goal but $1.50 for an assist -- because, as she put it, "it is better to give than receive."

I love that on so many levels. I helped coach girls soccer teams for some years, and getting the star players to pass was often tough. And moving into the world of organizations, as Jeff Pfeffer and I have been arguing for years, too many organizations create dysfunctional internal competition by saying they want cooperation but behaving in ways that promote selfish behavior. Chastain's grandfather applied a simple principle that can be used in even the most sophisticated reward systems -- one that I have seen used to good effect in places ranging from General Electric, to IDEO, to McKinsey.

P.S. The last Forever Green Awards will be in Santa Rosa at the Paradise Ridge Winery. Click here if you want to learn more.

I've written here before about research on the power of "non-sexual touching," notably evidence that when waitresses touch both male and female customers on the arm or wrist, they tend to be rewarded with bigger tips. Plus I wrote about another study that shows when either women or men are touched lightly on the back by women, they tend to take bigger financial risks. That second study showed that touching by men had no effect. Well, there is a new study that shows the power of nonsexual touch among male professional basketball players. You can read the pre-publication version here.

It is called : "Tactile Communication, Cooperation, and Performance: An Ethological Study of the NBA" and was published by Michael W. Kraus, Cassy Huang, and Dacher Keltner in a well-respected peer reviewed journal called Emotion earlier this year (Volume 10, pages 745-749).

In brief, here is how they set-up the paper; these are opening two paragraphs:

Some nonhuman primates spend upward of 20% of their waking hours grooming, a behavior primates rely upon to reconcile following conflict, to reward cooperative acts of food sharing, to maintain close proximity with caretakers, and to soothe (de Waal, 1989; Harlow, 1958). In humans, touch may be even more vital to trust, cooperation, and group functioning. Touch is the most highly developed sense at birth, and preceded language in hominid evolution (Burgoon, Buller, & Woodall, 1996). With brief, 1-second touches to the forearm, strangers can communicate prosocial emotions essential to cooperation within groups—gratitude, sympathy, and love—at rates of accuracy seven times as high as chance (Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006). Touch also promotes trust, a central component oflong-term cooperative bonds (Craig, Chen, Bandy, & Reiman, 2000; Sung et al., 2007; Williams & Bargh, 2008).

Guided by recent analyses of the social functions of touch (Hertenstein, 2002), we tested two hypotheses. First, we expected touch early in the season to predict both individual and team performance later on in the season. Second, we expected that touch would predict improved team performance through enhancing cooperative behaviors between teammates.

I love that. As I always tell doctoral students, and I emphasized during the years that I edited academic journals. A research paper is not a murder mystery. The reader should know what you are studying and why by the end of the second paragraph -- this is a nice example.

Kraus and his colleagues go onto explain their research method a bit later:

Coding of the tactile communication of 294 players from all 30 National Basketball Association (NBA) teams yielded the data to test our hypotheses. Each team’s tactile behavior was coded during one game played within the first 2 months of the start of the 2008–2009 NBA regular season. Games were coded for physical touch and cooperation by two separate teams of coders.

They explain:

We focused our analysis on 12 distinct types of touch that occurred when two or more players were in the midst of celebrating a positive play that helped their team (e.g., making a shot). These celebratory touches included fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles.On average, a player touched other teammates (M = 1.80, SD = 2.05) for a little less than 2 seconds during the game, or about one tenth of a second for every minute played.

They also had coders rate the amount of cooperation by each player studied during that same early season game:

[t]he following behaviors were considered expressions of cooperation and trust: talking to teammatesduring games, pointing or gesturing to one’s teammates, passing the basketball to a teammate who is less closely defended by the opposing team, helping other teammates on defense, helping other teammates escape defensive pressure (e.g., setting screens), and any other behaviors displaying a reliance on one’s teammates at the expense of one’s individual performance. In contrast, the following behaviors were considered expressions of a lack of cooperation and trust: taking shots when one is closely defended by the opposing team, holding the basketball without passing to teammates, shooting the basketball excessively, and any other behavior displaying reliance primarily on one’s self rather than on one’s teammates.

Karaus and his coauthors then used these imperfect but intriguing measures of touching and cooperation to predict the subsequent performance of players and their teams later in the season; I won't go into all the analysis they did, but the authors did at least a decent job of ruling out alternative explanations for the link between touching and performance such as players salaries, early season performance, and expert's expectations about the prospects for team performance in 2008-2009. And they still got some rather amazing findings:

1. Players who touched their teammates more had higher "Win scores," defined as "a performance measure that accounts for the positive impact a player has on his team’s success (rebounds, points, assists, blocks, steals) while also accounting for the amount of the team’s possessions that player uses (turnovers, shot attempts). "

2. Teams where players touched teammates more also enjoyed significantly superior team performance than those where players touch teammates less (the authors used a more complicated measure of team performance than win-loss record, it took into account multiple factors like scoring efficiency and assists, and other measures, which correlated .84 with the number of wins that season.

3. The authors present further analyses suggesting that the increased cooperation among teams where players engage in more "fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles" explain why touching is linked to individual and team performance.

Now, to be clear, as the authors point out, this an imperfect study. They only looked at touching in one game for each team. So there is plenty to complain about if you want to picky. But I would add two reminders before we all get too critical. The first is that there is no reason I can see to expect that the weaknesses in this study would inflate the effects of touching; rather, quite the opposite. The second is that the touching and cooperation were coded by multiple independent coders who did not know the researchers' hypotheses or the patterns they were looking for, and there was very high agreement (over 80%) among them.

As the researchers emphasize. more research is needed, but this study at least suggests that it is worth doing. It is at least strong enough to increase rather decrease my confidence in the the touching-cooperation-team performance link. And the way it plays out in different settings might require some careful adjustments in research methods and employee behavior. For example, basketball is setting where touch is clearly more socially acceptable than in the offices that many of us work in. So if you and your sales or project team all of a sudden decide to start doing high-fives, group hugs, and chest bumps, it might backfire given local norms. Perhaps a more reasonable inference is that, given what is socially acceptable where you work, touching on the high side of the observed natural range just might help.

I would love to hear reader's comments ont his research, as it is quite intriguing to me.

P.S. No, this is not an invitation for you creepy guys out there to start grabbing your colleagues and followers in inappropriate ways that make them squirm and make you even more disgusting to be around!